I had almost finished my first comic book script, an impressive seven issue (175 page) story called “Limbo Cafe,” and as I’ve felt I often give up and don’t complete things, so I didn’t complete this. At the time my friend from art school, Damon Thompson, had said he would draw Limbo Cafe, but it was unrealistic because it’s too big a commitment, not to mention his schedule had become too busy just trying to graduate from U.C. Davis. On top of that, I couldn’t get any comics companies to look at my scripts, and I didn’t know any other artists, and 175 pages was too overwhelming for me to comprehend doing myself, so my interest in the project began to wane, and other ideas started floating around in my head. I had been seeing images of a body found on a freeway with someone else’s head sewn on it, and of a grave-digger who was an innocent victim of circumstance. That really made me laugh when I thought of it, for some reason. Maybe it wasn’t quite as funny in execution…This was “The Lump.”Due to my limited options, and it being a significantly smaller project (originally slated at 75 pages) I grew increasingly intrigued (or resigned) to draw this particular story myself. But 75 pages is still a lot, and I didn’t want to get too bogged down “wasting time” with drawing. (I slyly envisioned going to portfolio reviews as a ruse, using the time it took editors to look at the pages to pitch my story. I’ve generally felt I’m a much better, more confident writer than artist.) To keep the pressure lower, I made the decision to draw amateurishly simplistic artwork. I rationalized to myself, people will like the interesting combination of crude artwork and often graphically disturbing medical and horror descriptions. And I never did get graphic or explicit with the artwork, even in the end.
I had of course read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art at this time, both of which were great. But the advice I found most helpful was Dave Sim’s title pages for Cerebus on how to self-publish (Which I believe are collected in a comic he titled “How to Self-Publish.” The advice that really made sense to me was, don’t get bogged down. If you draw a shitty drawing, don’t fix it, draw another one and make it better as a result of what you learned. And keep drawing and drawing and experimenting and learning, and after about one or two hundred pages you should start to get a feel for it, and get a rhythm for it. That made sense to me.
Now I’ve read a lot of comics, and sometimes, especially in larger bodies of work, an artist’s vision doesn’t seem fully realized when s/he begins the work, and the characters and the feel of the book completely evolve over time into something different. And of course that’s what eventually happens with all artists, because they grow and learn while they work. But I wanted to try and at least minimalize this as best I could, so I began sketching out the characters over and over, to try and get a feel for them. I published a number of these sketches in the Lump Trade Paperback.
When I thought I was getting into a rhythm and understanding of who would be in the stories, I did some layouts of panels, then of the pages (also published in the trade). This I began in pencil, and finally filled in with sharpies. I was most interested in trying to use blacks to define the shapes of forms, rather than get all bogged down with perfect renderings. I liked the idea of a clumsy, thick, consistent line quality where foreground and background alike were treated with equal width. I thought it would make an interesting artistic experiment, because even the thick-line artists I loved (notably Mike Allred) would use thin lines inside the thicks for detail. This artistic experiment failed, as you can see with these early sketches. But most of all I enjoyed trying to give a feeling of depth to a two-dimensional piece of paper, with thick blacks, thick lines, and a little white poking through, and nothing else.
I knew I wanted a dark, film-noir-style world, and wanted to use as much black as possible. I found that in pencil my compositions worked okay, but when I filled in the blacks, they were often heavier than I anticipated and felt crooked to the eye. This took some experimenting with, so that many of my early sketches were covered with black, then re-covered with white-out, then blacked back in again, until I could reach a balanced feel.
I did the pages of the story in order. After five pages like this, I felt confident enough of how the blacks were working, and stopped inking, content to see the layouts in pencil. And this I continued for twenty-four pages into the story. Again, these were all sketches on 8 1/2 x 11″ typing paper with sharpies, and I kept going because in my head this would ensure the art wouldn’t change over time. The original concept was for the story to be told in three 24-page issues, so this was the first issue completely sketched out.
I decided I was ready to begin the “actual” comic. This I did on 11×17″ Bristol, but I continued to use sharpies. Interestingly, the lines no longer seemed as thick, since I continued to use the same thickness of marker, but the pages had become twice as big. Also, I quickly found that the proportion of width to height was different on typing paper than on bristol. On the typing paper, each panel was much wider. Not only that, but as I redrew my layouts, faces changed expression or proportion, and often I was happier with the original sketches than the “actual” pages, or at the least they were both different. And even though the artwork did evolve over the course of these twenty-four pages, I would just copy the evolution all over again going through the pages. And worst of all, not only was the art crude, but the compositions were depressingly so. Some I would change from my original sketches as I went, but often not making the pages any better. I just kept plugging away through those 24 pages I had already sketched, and making the best of them I could. Overall, I still found myself reasonably pleased. Maybe since I didn’t know any better. I rationalized that I WANTED simplistic art and compositions.
I shopped these pages to APE-Con in San Francisco, and most editors of indie publishing companies felt the art was so-so. So I went home and kept plugging away.
I decided I had an all right feel for the book by now, and just went for it with the following 24 pages, without preliminary sketches. And now I was two-thirds finished.
Taking these pages to my first trip to San Diego’s Comic-Con and shopping it to editors, I became very intrigued by Alex Sinclair’s suggestion to try a few four-page stories, just as exercises. They’re not such a big commitment, but they still force you to tell a story with a beginning, a conflict, and a resolution, and practice narrative storytelling. This gave me a break from “The Lump,” and before I’d done a couple Dr. DeBunko and a couple Dick Hammer stories, I was beginning to re-visualize “The Lump.” I had met Dick Ayers at the Con, and we began collaborating on Doris Danger stories as well.
Also, I’d met Sam Kieth, and he, like everyone else, was saying how it’s tough to get published until you’ve been published. He said he would talk to editors who wouldn’t look at his work, and then he’d mention he was published, and they’d suddenly look at him and say, “Oh, disregard everything I said. Let’s see what we can do for you.”
Up until this moment, I REALLY didn’t want to self-publish. I knew it would be all this extra work, and I wanted to just focus on the writing and the drawing. But when Sam suggested it, I guess it finally just sunk in. I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do.
Now I was thinking, “The Lump” is a horror story, and has a noir sensibility, but more than that, it’s a story of our pop-culture’s fascination with horror stories. And I realized I wanted to use more photo-reference with the characters involved. If all the characters are stereotypes of these genres of stories, I should photo-reference these types of characters straight out of the movies I’m referring to thematically. I made a list of all the characters in “The Lump,” and who I would want to play them, if I had access to all of history’s actors. And of course most of them came from the ’30s horror films or ’40s film noirs. Even with photo reference, I decided to keep the same use of black, and thick lines, but I switched to brush and ink, which all the editors said I should use instead of sharpie, and with which I found myself clumsy and inarticulate. I found pages felt more frantic and stifled with more panels per page, and experimented (when I was brave) with some compositions. Although most of them, once I had an image in my head, it was hard to break free of.
Partially because my skill wasn’t good enough, and partially because I did try and alter people somewhat (giving clean-shaven actors mustaches, or baldness, for example) almost none of my drawings wound up looking like the actors I had in mind, and certainly no one mentioned once the stories came out that they recognized who the characters were supposed to be (except for one). But by now, this was my third time drawing these damn pages, and I was ready to get them out in print.